and cadaverous young man was raising the top of the
piano, slowly and laboriously, as though it were too heavy for him.
Valentine Venn looked over his shoulder.

"Good God!" said he. "Another fact worth most folks' fiction--another
coincidence you wouldn't dare to use!"

"Why--who is it?"

Venn's answer was to hail the dark, thin youth with rude geniality. The
young fellow hesitated, almost shrank, but came shyly forward in the
end. Langholm noted that he looked very ill, that his face was as
sensitive as it was thin and pale, but his expression singularly sweet
and pleasing.

"Severino," said Venn, with a play-actor's pomp, "let me introduce you
to Charles Langholm, the celebrated novelist--'whom not to know is to
argue yourself unknown.'"

"Which is the champion _non sequitur_ of literature," added Langholm,
with literary arrogance, as he took the lad's hand cordially in his own,
only to release it hurriedly before he crushed such slender fingers to
their hurt.

"Mr. Langholm," pursued Venn, "is the hero of that paragraph"--Langholm
kicked him under the table--"that--that paragraph about his last book,
you know. Severino, Langholm, is the best pianist we have had in the
club since I have been a member, and you will say the same yourself in
another minute. He always plays to us when he drops in to dine, and you
may think yourself lucky that he has dropped in to-night."

"But where does the coincidence come in?" asked Langholm, as the young
fellow returned to the piano with a rather sad shake of the head.

"What!" cried Venn, below his breath; "do you mean to say you are a
friend of Mrs. Minchin's, or whatever her name is now, and that you
never heard of Severino?"

"No," replied Langholm, his heart in an instantaneous flutter. "Who is
he?"

"The man she wanted to nurse the night her husband was murdered--the
cause of the final row between them! His name was kept out of the
papers, but that's the man."

Langholm sat back in his chair. To have spent a summer's day in stolid
search for traces of this man, only to be introduced to the man himself
by purest chance in the evening! It was, indeed, difficult to believe;
nor was persuasion on the point followed by the proper degree of
gratitude in Langholm for a transcendent stroke of fortune. In fact, he
almost resented his luck; he would so much rather have stood indebted to
his skill. And there were other causes for disappointment, as in an
instant there were